Day: March 16, 2016

Folders from KGB Archive Dumped in Pile on Bolshaya Lubyanka StreetWhat are the covers for the country’s main documents doing outside?
March 16, 2016Moslenta.ru

Photo: Anton Belitsky/MOSLENTA

A MOSLENTA correspondent has discovered a mound of folders from the KGB Central Archive in the vicinity of Lubyanka Square. About a hundred empty boxes are lying along the wall at Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, 14, right next to the Orlov-Denisov House aka the Pozharsky Palace.

“There are KGB archival folders lying in the yard,” said our correspondent. “I took a couple snapshots on my telephone, and security guards immediately ran up to me. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ they said. ‘We got a call from the FSB. What are you doing here?’ They asked me to stop shooting.”

The duty officer at the Public Relations Center of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) informed MOSLENTA that he knew nothing about the KGB files and could not comment on their appearance in downtown Moscow.

[Simon Kordonsky:] No, I spent a few years reading what no one else reads: science fiction and fantasy, mysticism, that sort of thing. You can deduce the real “ideology” by reading these sources.

Simon Kordonsky

So there is Perkhel [?], a guy from Chelyabinsk who wrote a trilogy about how Russia has lost a war and the European part of the country has been completely occupied. A resistance to the invaders has been organized in Chelyabinsk, and the resistance does everything to destroy them. That is one type of literature.

The second type is science fiction, where you find a certain Russian future. Again, this future has an imperial, estates-based structure, which is fighting against foreign invaders.

This is a huge body of literature, thousands of titles. A worldview is broadcast in these books. People buy them. Walk into any bookstore in the regions and that is the only literature there is.

I have this one practical lesson I teach. Our campus is near the bookstore Biblio-Globus [in downtown Moscow]. My students and I take tape measures and we go measure worldviews. This store is indicative. We take measurements: how many meters of shelf space are taken up by “history.” Some book by [Alexander] Bushkov is on the shelf, and there are no references in it, meaning it is not history, but quasi-history. Mythologized history makes up ninety percent of the historical literature [for sale].

Cover of Alexander Buskhov, The Russia That Wasn’t, 3: Mirages and Ghosts (2004)

Then we measure the medicine section. It’s only one and a half meters long. Medicine per se takes up ten to twenty centimeters. The rest is taken up by books on self-treatment, herbal medicine, and cosmetics.

And we measure politics. On the first floor there is an entire “Miscellaneous” section. Once, [ROSSPEN’s] History of Stalinism took up a whole shelf there. Now that space is filled with works by quasi-politicians and philosophers. It is completely strange kitsch.

Simon Kordonskyheads the Laboratory for Local Administration at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Images courtesy ofplatf.infoandozon.ru. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade ES for the heads-up